Multiple Choice

MOMA’s “Multiplex” exhibits

Art since 1970 has gone sideways fast. That’s the gist of “Multiplex,” a devoutly pluralist show, in three sections, at MOMA, curated by Deborah Wye from the museum’s collection. (The movie-mall model proves just right for the oversized second-floor galleries, which have swamped previous contemporary surveys.) “Provocation” urges us to be unsettled, if we can, by Robert Gober, Sarah Lucas, and others whose careful rudenesses stir nostalgia for times, recent but extinct, when art still could shock more efficiently than popular culture. “Mutability” is a nebulous rubric for fine stuff by unclassifiables like Louise Bourgeois, David Hammons, and Kiki Smith. “Abstractions,” Wye’s best focus, describes a fertile field in what has seemed like a wilderness since abstraction lost its cynosure status as the rolling wave of the future. Why go abstract now? To be intelligent. Among many strong works, paintings by Terry Winters and Thomas Scheibitz, sculpture by Lynda Benglis and Tobias Putrih, and a video by Jeremy Blake are bracing propositions of what art might be and should do. ♦